Mapping international uses of innovative finance

A significant gap has been identified between current resources and the action needed in Scotland for nature recovery to address both the climate and nature emergencies. Expanding the use of natural capital approaches including ecosystem markets offers the opportunity to close the gap. This will include identifying new and innovative funding sources.

This report summarises a systematic mapping of the peer-reviewed literature on different natural capital finance approaches. This literature is currently dominated by carbon markets as the most established ecosystem-based market. But that experience provides an opportunity to identify lessons for the implementation of ecosystem markets. The systematic mapping was followed up by the less in-depth quantitative analysis of 33 case studies of ecosystem markets.